Podcast

Your body is your ancestor altar, how hungry ghosts affect the living, the earth as the repository of ancestral wisdom, & more...

In the Intro:

Cleatus B. Wright , January 20, 1929 - February 27th, 1929

In the Interview:

The hunger for our ancestors

The story of Daniel's first ancestral connection, and the healing that followed

The ancestors are the collective wisdom of our species in all its beauty and trauma

Time collapses when in communion with the ancestors

Not all of the dead are equally well

The deeply embedded alcoholism in my fatherline

Addiction as the hunger of the dead moving through the bodies of the living, and the act of taking the substance as a form of ancestral communion

There are very few personal problems- a look at unmetabolized ancestral pain and systemic injustice

The dead can change

Ancestral forgetting as a function of the damage wrought by colonialism

We don't arrive at healing by exiling those who commit harm: an approach for white folks wishing to address their slave owning/colonizing/oppressive ancestral legacy (rather than ignoring it or living in perpetual guilt)

The role of the ancestors in social and earth justice

The interweaving of ritual, genealogical research, and healing

Synchronicity

They are shaking us awake in the burning house- the growing sense of urgency coming to us from the ancestors at this pivotal point in human history

The dead are in the earth, and the ancestors are animating the earth that is our bodies

Approaching activism in a more ritual oriented way

When a child is a returning of an ancestral lineage, mothering is my main form of ancestral reverence, and remembering that our children are the future ancestors of our further descendants

Are souls that die suddenly lost in limbo?

I ask Daniel a vulnerable question about my mom, who died in a car accident in November 2015

The most important way that we prepare for death is to be ethical and kind

Animism: living humans are just one kind of person / coming into relationship with the wider web of being